The present invention relates to electronic games, and particularly to methods and devices for securing and ensuring the randomness of electronic or online games.
Various forms of electronic games of chance have been available for many years. The way these games are played, however, is changing dramatically with the use of digital computers operating on electronic networks such as the Internet. Players can now connect to a remote server and wager electronically.
Rather than traveling to a casino, a player can log into an electronic game and wager from the comforts of his own home. While this remote playing has many advantages, it raises several security issues. For example, when playing card games at a casino, a player can observe the dealer shuffle and deal the cards and thus has some confidence that the outcome was generated randomly. In an electronic casino, the shuffling process is typically digitally generated, driven by random number generators which the player cannot see. The player cannot know whether the random number generated is truly random or was selected by the casino to give it an advantage.
Electronic game providers have tried to increase players""confidence in the legitimacy of games by assuring players that gaming software has not been tampered with. For example, an electronic game provider may allow an independent third party to perform an audit of the software. This is a time-consuming and expensive process, however. With complex software running into the hundreds of thousands of lines of code, it is very difficult to find a few lines of code that alter the randomness of the outcomes. Also, use of an independent, third party auditor shifts the need for trust to another party, and does not guarantee the legitimacy of the game.
Some electronic lottery systems have subscribed to methods for securing communications between remote player terminals and a central controller. U.S. Pat. No. 4,652,998 to Koza, for example, describes cryptographic methods for securing these communications. In games dependent on the use of random numbers, however, simply securing the transmission of a fraudulent random number does not solve the problems inherent in the prior art.
Although there are many patents which describe the generation of random numbers, such as U.S. Pat. No. 3,548,174 to Knuth, they describe only methods for improving the statistical performance of random number generators.
Accordingly, the present invention is directed to systems and methods for ensuring the randomness of random numbers and authenticating the results of electronic games in a manner that substantially obviates one or more of the problems due to limitations and disadvantages of the related art. The present invention overcomes the limitations and disadvantages noted above by including in an electronic game system hardware and procedures to ensure that random numbers used to generate game results are truly random, independently-generated numbers.
To overcome the disadvantages of the prior art, and in accordance with the present invention, as embodied and broadly described, the invention includes an electronic game system comprising a game server and one or more player terminals. The game server includes a random number generator and a first transmitting device for transmitting a first random number to the one or more player terminals. The one or more player terminals includes a random number generator and a second transmitting device for transmitting a second random number to the game server. The system also includes hardware and procedures for ensuring that the first random number is generated independently of the second random number.
Also in accordance with the purposes of the invention, as embodied and broadly described, the invention recites a method of controlling an electronic game played in a system including a game server and one or more player terminals. The method includes the steps of generating a first random number at the game server; generating a second random number at the player terminal; encoding the first random number at the game server; encoding the second random number at the player terminal; transmitting a player encoded number from the player terminal to the game server; transmitting a player decoding key from the player terminal to the game server; and decoding the player encoded number at the game server to obtain the second random number.
For both the systems and methods of the invention, the invention generates a result value based on the first random number and the second random number and produces a game result based on the result value.
The invention further includes the systems and procedures of the game server and the player terminal separately and hardware and procedures for encoding, hashing, encrypting, decoding, dehashing, and decrypting the first and second random numbers. Moreover, the systems and procedures of the present invention provide for authenticating players and creating audit records of game data.
Additional objects and advantages of the invention will be set forth in part in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention will be realized and attained by means of the elements and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims. It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the invention, as claimed.